Rape victim sits on Death Row / Islamic law punishes Pakistani woman but not male attacker

Seth Mydans, New York Times

Published
4:00 am PDT, Friday, May 17, 2002

2002-05-17 04:00:00 PDT Chorlaki, Pakistan -- The evidence of guilt was there for all to see: a newborn baby girl in the arms of its mother, a village woman named Zafran Bibi.

Her crime: She had been raped. Her sentence: death by stoning.

Now Zafran, who is about 26, is in solitary confinement in a Death Row cell in Kohat, a nearby town. The only visitor she is allowed is her daughter, now a year old and being cared for by a prison nurse.

Zafran is a peasant woman of the hot and barren hills of Pakistan's North- West Frontier Province. Unschooled and illiterate, like most other women here, she may have little understanding of what has happened to her. But her story is not uncommon under Pakistan's strict Islamic laws.

Thumping a fat red statute book, the white-bearded judge who convicted her, Anwar Ali Khan, said he had simply followed the letter of the Koran-based law, known as hudood, that mandates punishments.

"The illegitimate child is not disowned by her and therefore is proof of zina," he said, referring to laws that forbid any sexual contact outside marriage. Furthermore, he said, in accusing her brother-in-law of raping her, Zafran had confessed to her crime.

"The lady stated before this court that, yes, she had committed sexual intercourse, but with the brother of her husband," Khan said. "This left no option to the court but to impose the highest penalty."

Although legal fine points do exist, little distinction is made in court between forced and consensual sex.

When hudood was enacted 23 years ago, the laws were described as measures to ban "all forms of adultery, whether the offense is committed with or without the consent of the parties." But it is almost always the women who are punished, whatever the facts.

The case of Zafran fits a familiar pattern. But it raised an outcry, even in Pakistan, because of the sentence of death by stoning, a punishment called for by hudood but never carried out here. The facts of her case have become the subject of editorials and news stories in Pakistan, bringing her some notoriety, and in early May a higher court called for a review of Zafran's sentence.

But even if the case returns to a more typical course, she is likely to spend 10 to 15 years in prison as the result of her rape, said Rukhshanda Naz, who heads the local branch of a women's rights group called Aurat. As many as 80 percent of all women in Pakistani jails have been convicted under laws that ban extramarital sex, according to Aurat.

Zafran, whether she was angry or just naive, chose to point her finger at the man she said had raped her. The assaults, she said, came sometimes on the hillside behind her house when she went to cut hay, sometimes at home when nobody was there to see.

Sardar Ali Khan, her lawyer, said that Zafran had told him she cried when she was raped and that she had cried again as she spoke to him about what happened.

Her husband, Niamat Khan, was serving a prison sentence for murder, and in his absence she had become the plaything of at least one of his brothers.

"She complained to her mother-in-law and her father-in-law," her lawyer said, "but they just turned away." It was her pregnancy that forced her accusations into the open and led to her conviction for zina.

Human rights groups say abuse of women is endemic in Pakistan. Often, they are locked inside their homes, where they are subjected to beatings, acid attacks, burning and rape. Every year there are hundreds of "honor killings," in which a woman is murdered for perceived breaches of modesty.

Rape is a crime under hudood, but it is so difficult to prove that almost no men have been convicted. However, human rights workers say, as many as half the women who report a rape are charged with adultery.

"With the men, they apply the principle that you are innocent until proven guilty," said Asma Jahangir, an official of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and the author of a book on hudood. "With the women, they apply the principle that you are guilty until proven innocent."

The man Zafran accused, Jamal Khan, was set free without charges. Under the laws of zina, four male witnesses, all Muslims and all citizens of upright character, must testify to having seen a rape take place. The testimony of women or non-Muslims is not admissible. The victim's accusation also carries little weight; the only significant testimony she can give is an admission of guilt.

"The proof is totally impossible," said Naz. "If a woman brings a charge of rape, she puts herself in grave danger." If, on the other hand, the woman does not report the rape and becomes pregnant out of wedlock, her silence can be taken as proof of guilt.

A man can deflect an accusation of rape by claiming that his victim, of any age, consented. If the victim has reached puberty, she is considered to be an adult and is then subject to prosecution for zina. As a result, the Aurat report says, girls as young as 12 or 13 have been convicted of having forbidden sexual relations and have been punished with imprisonment and public whippings.

Zafran's father, Zaidan, said he had sold his family's only possessions, two thin goats, to help pay for a lawyer.

"When we heard the sentence, we couldn't breathe," he said. "We couldn't think. For days we couldn't eat. There was nothing we could do for our daughter."

His wife, Shiraka, looked away. "I have been sucked dry by grief," she said.